Tag Archives: Heart of Ice

“The Lost Legion” is the second volume of the “Dangerous Worlds Gamebooks” series, by Marc J. Wilson. In it, we will command a group of soldiers in a hostile and unknown land, looking for the mysterious 17th legion, a previous expedition that travelled to the same place in the past looking for riches.

As you may remember, about six months ago in this same blog I reviewed the first volume of the series, “Restless Heart of Evil“. The story was centered in the populous city of Deva and outskirts. I was pleasantly surprised, not only with how well developed was the background of the story – that city of Deva full of nuances and secrets – but also with the superb writing style of the author, way beyond what is usual in gamebook writers. If we add to that a fascinating plot full of unexpected twists, you will understand why even today, “Restless Heart of Evil” is one of the gamebooks I’ve enjoyed the most in recent times. That’s why, when Marc Wilson sent me “The Lost Legion”, my expectations couldn’t be higher.

As I summarized at the beginning, the story is set on a virgin and unexplored land, and we will be in charge of little more than a hundred soldiers, almost criminals in their city of origin. We will be exposed to disease and to the dangers of the jungle, with the goal of finding the trail of a previous mission, that of the 17th legion, in which only one survivor arrived to the city of Deva. That survivor, a mean-spirited and sadistic pigmy called Butu, will be our guide in this savage and inhospitable land. Our and our men’s survival will depend on the choices we make, and on how much we can trust the advice of our evil-minded guide.

It is very different as a story to “Restless Heart of Evil” in more than one sense. Starting with the environment, a hostile land full of dangers and disease, barely inhabited, in contrast to the urban and populous setting of the first part. Also, the kind of protagonist we will be guiding is very different. In fact, we will act as a group of people during a great part of the story, our men, and we will have to take care of their numbers and their motivation in order to reach a good conclusion. But at some points we will switch to an individual character when, for whatever reason, we get split from our soldiers. In fact, many areas in this story can be explored in both ways.

The treatment of the story of this expedition is also different to the usual in these kind of tales. If we take “Temple of the Spider God“, from Tin Man Games, as an example of a similar story, we will notice how in “The Lost Legion“, nature and its dangers will be depicted with a much more somber, hostile and realistic touch, not as close to the mere adventure tale as in Jonathan Green‘s gamebook. Here we will be facing real moral dilemmas, we will deal with amoral characters, like our guide Butu or the officer Lodeiro, and even many of our options will reflect the harshness of a historical period very different from our own; like the fact of being able to select slaves as part of our ship’s cargo. I was surprised to find out how a certain object that gives access to some of the most interesting encounters in the game, can only be obtained after taking a horrible decision; to gift our slaves to a non-human tribe, condemning them to a certain death.

It is a much closer reflection of how real expeditions, like the one of Hernán Cortés, could have been during the XVI century, very different to the romanticized version of them we got through adventure novels.

The world we will be exploring is fascinating, nonetheless. Full of strange cultures and ancient ruins, maintaining always a solid internal logic though, and giving out subtle clues to make us better understand the ending of the story. It is not usual for a gamebook to entice me to replay it, to uncover all of its secrets, but it happened to me with this one; I really recommend reading it multiple times, looking for different paths. The amount of different possible stories that “The Lost Legions” is capable of telling us is overwhelming. Even after a good number of playthroughs, when I believed I had seen it all, when I talked with the author, I discovered there was a whole new series of encounters I hadn’t explored.

I’ve mentioned the ending of the story. If there was something in “Restless Heart of Evil” that somehow devalued the whole, was the ending. Here it is completely the opposite. The reflection that the author makes through the last section of this book is what gives sense to the whole story. It turns this gamebook, in my opinion, along with Heart of Ice by Dave Morris, in one of the few that not only wants to “entertain us” and be “fun to read”, but actually aims to be a much deeper, almost philosophical, statement. That “other land” that is revealed at the end, a place that is at the same time a blessing and a threat, reminds me of the “desired paradise” central to all religions and ideologies, and reflects a view from his author that is also a reflection of our world, full of contradictions and injustices, but eager to be transformed into a better world.

I can only recommend this “The Lost Legion” for what it is; one of the best gamebooks I’ve played in recent times, a work aiming a different kind of reader, a more critical and more mature one. A reader who not only aspires to get entertained, but expects to go a bit farther than that.

“Restless Heart of Evil“, by Marc J. Wilson, is the first volume on the series “Dangerous Worlds Gamebooks“. It has been another example of a gamebook series having used a crowdfunding platform successfully (Kickstarter, in this case) managing to obtain 3427£ of an initial request of 2000£.

What Marc J. Wilson proposes with this series is adapting the gamebook media to the current age of their readers; if gamebook series back in the decade of the 80s were destined to young readers, with this series Marc aims to adapt the same themes to those same old fans, who have already reached the thirties. The characters of these stories aren’t “sons of kings or great wizards”, but simple adventurers struggling in grim worlds of dark fantasy or dystopian futures, just to survive in many cases. Also, the content pretends to be more “grown-up”, not shying away from descriptions of violence.

Does this “Restless Heart of Evil” honor those objectives? For starters, the story places us in the role of an ex-mercenary and ex-slave with a hard childhood – his mother died when giving him birth, and he discovered as a child the corpse of his father, a merchant, who hanged himself after loosing all his possessions on a shipwreck – that was bought on a slave market by the professor Hyeronimus Kroos. He provided him with the education he was always denied, and turned him into a trusted servant and friend. When the story begins, the professor has sent a letter to our protagonist asking him to bring some volumes from his library to the city of Deva. And there we go by ship when the narration starts.

This gamebookuses a diceless system, similar to those of other gamebooks, like “Necklace of Skulls” or “Heart of Ice” by Dave Morris, where the result of our actions is totally deterministic. It depends on the character creation process, where we divide some points between attributes, on the gifts (special capabilities) we have selected, our decisions and the objects and knowledge we have been able to obtain throughout our adventure. Personally I tend to prefer these kind of systems, to those where some bad dice rolls can play havoc with a whole series of good decisions, although here the preferences may be different depending on who – for example, Marc. J. Wilson has already announced that the next volumes on the series will use a different system using dice, at the request of most of his readers.

The background of this story, the city of Devas, is very well constructed. Here we aren’t talking about a world of generic fantasy, with heroes and villians. The city is a place of deep inequalities, corruption, and many different factions fighting for power. A city with an interesting history – it was an ancient elven city abandoned by their original builders, and there are still traces of the old elvish buildings and, as we will discover later on, their dangerous catacombs.

It’s a city that feels alive, evolving all through the book. Several events will change the places we can access to, and what we will find when we arrive to them. As we go deeper in the plot and discover the sinister conspirancy that will put at risk the destine of the city, we will know also its darkest aspects, and we will live the horror and violence on the streets, described with all detail.

The writing of this work is excellent, allowing us to bring ourselves to this complex, dark and violent world. If only, at some points it tends to abuse stereotypes when describing its characters. But it is forgivable when the experience of the story gives us the sense of having lived a complex and epic tale, full of unexpected turnarounds and interesting revelations. The ending felt a little bit dissapointing, with that new suggested complication – maybe aimed at giving cause for new stories set in the same world – that reminded me too much of american horror movies and their “final scare“.

As a side remark, I would add that the illustrations included in the book, by Edmundo Garing, are some of the best I’ve seen in any gamebook.

To sum up, a very good gamebook, showing how the genre has evolved since its “golden decade” in the eighties, aiming to a different kind of readers, and without any doubt a very appealing adquisition for the library of any lover of the genre.